KOPI & KISHI

Post-release monitoring is running smoothly at Bukit Batikap, with the five new orangutans released at the end of February observed every day during the week following their arrival.

Having established that they are active and feeding regularly (and mating in a couple of cases), our attention has turned back to some of our longer-term residents. One of them, 13-year-old female Kopi, has been detected by our radio receivers several times since January. But with the signal coming from the furthest north end of the valley, far from the rivers that serve as our only access, it is unsurprising that the last sighting of Kopi was eight months ago in July.

Kopi means coffee in Indonesian, and I was glad to have had a strong cup of her liquid namesake before the long day that monitoring technician Owang and I had ahead of us on 19th March. A two-hour boat journey upstream was followed by a trek along a high ridge from which Kopi’s signal had been detected the previous day. At first her signal was weak, sometimes disappearing altogether, but as we moved south-west the signal strength grew gradually from 0 to +3 on the fine tuning dial, at which point we veered from the ridge. A little down the slope it reached the maximum of +5 and it wasn’t long until Owang spotted a flash of orange hair high in the trees, where the orangutan was eating young leaves.

Kopi has a Baby!
Unlike the “rehab” orangutans raised, fed and schooled in forest survival skills by human babysitters and technicians in Nyaru Menteng Reintroduction Centre, Kopi is wild and therefore sees people only as a threat to be avoided, not unwisely. After ten minutes of hiding very still 25 metres above the ground, she spent the remaining hours of observation kiss-squeaking (a call indicating distress or displeasure made by sucking sharply between two lips or against the palm of the hand), fleeing, and sending down large branches for Owang and me to dodge as they crashed to the ground.

No wonder then that it took us a while to notice the tiny, nearly bald infant clinging to her belly. Probably under four months of age, this was the first time this baby – Kopi’s first – had been seen by our monitoring team, or most likely any human at all, and it had not been known that she was pregnant. Who fathered the child remains unknown; in this (mostly) solitary ape species, the burdens of parenthood fall entirely on the mother.

A Nervous New Mother
The conditions for taking behavioural data are not ideal if your focal is so hard to see and her bahaviour is so affected by the observers’ presence. Nonetheless, we stayed with mother and child for a few hours to check that both were healthy and pushed our camera’s zoom to the limit, necks craned, to get some photographic evidence. At 2pm we left Kopi in peace so she could take the time to find food, at a stage when producing breastmilk is a contant and vital task.

Identifying the infant’s sex (generally done the same way one would a human baby) was not possible at the moment because Kopi was very nervous and protective. But with a healthy, protective mother who has survived in this forest for over two years, there’s every reason to hope that this youngster has a long future ahead as a wild orangutan. We hope that we’ll be able to identify the infant’s sex in the near future and will update you when we do.

An Inspiring Name for Kopi’s Baby
BOS Foundation names each and every orangutan we care for, so we turned to our loyal friends and supporters on Facebook and Twitter to help us find a suitable name for Kopi’s new baby; a name that could work for both female and male, considering that we haven’t been able to identify the baby’s sex.

We had a super response to our #QuizBOSF #NameTheOrangutan contest held on April 16 - 30, 2015. Over 60 inspiring names were suggested from which we managed to choose 5 finalists: Batik (from Wenny Natalia), Carera (from Siti Norsyuhada Kamaluddin), Dinda (from Amanda Bright), Kishi (from Debora Dian Utami), dan Luca (from Shari Javins).

After a long discussion by our team in Nyaru Menteng, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer our congratulations and thanks to Debora Dian Utami who suggested the winning name “Kishi”.

The name Kishi is of Japanese origin meaning “a long and happy life”. We hope that Kishi will indeed live a long and happy life together with mum, Kopi, in Bukit Batikap Conservation Forest, Central Kalimantan.

Welcome to the world, Kishi!